An engineer who sold £58,000 of kit stolen from the UK's National Air Traffic Control Centre on eBay to pay off a credit card debt was jailed for 15 months on Monday.
Andrew Woffinden, 43, of Fareham, Hampshire, a former IT worker with Serco, turned criminal in order to pay off his wife's credit card bills. During a sentencing …

*cough*

Yes, of course all parts of the British establishment encrypt all sensitive data all the time don't they!

Yeah right.

Although it's a bit unfair that they discounted he could not have wiped the data as he didn't have the skill given the plethora of bootable linux based drive wiping self contained CD images there are available, not to mention the online guides and how-tos explaining how to securely wipe drives.

I hope his lawyer was cheap, because letting the prosecution sneak in a paranoia fuelled "sensitive data was sold on ebay!!" slur without an adequate defence is pretty pathetic.

Not so smart

Typical

Working class, steels £58k of equipment and gets JAIL!

I'll bet you any money that there are MP's with bigger skeletons in their closets who are in parliament right now representing us.

In my opinion this guy is stupid, but also as much a victim of reckless lending as anyone else who's ever got over their head in debt. Indeed my company went the same way, then called in Chapter11 bankruptcy. IE, it was business as usual, but anyone that was owed money then had a bean with a nominal value that they could either cash in, or wait to mature into two beans somewhere in the future.

The way individuals and lower class people are treated in relation to this sort of crime is disgusting.

Forthose who missed it..

He was working with the installers of the new kit.. new kit goes in old kit goes to shredding, or at least it should have seems it stopped of at his car boot.

as for the stated value I bet that was the initil contract price, not the fact that it was outdated rubbish going for shredding.. Point is though it is shredded for security not because it is not wanted. if it were not wanted then it might be ok for him to take it.but he should seek permission first.

Several Things

Firsty, yes he should indeed get jail. Even if he stole ONE laptop, it's still theft. Secondly, they probably have the same numpty security as many other government places where if you have a contractor pass you can come and go as you please and nothings ever questioned.

But regardless, he stole several things from a customer, that's theft, theft = jail. Not sure what the argument here is. As for the MP's not going to to jail, well you have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt to have committed a crime first don't you ;) And MP's are a cunning bunch!

@Clive Galway

@ AC 20:52

"Who is the nimrod that puts classified data on a laptop???????????????"

Who is the nimrod who decided everyone has to work on laptops now?

Sure it's gotten to the point where they're about as cost effective as a desktop PC but they are still easy to break, easy to steal, difficult to upgrade and expensive to fix (if the mobo or the screen dies you might as well bin it ).

You find me one office on earth where the employees *need* laptops and aren't just using them because the director met up with a laptop salesman on the golf course.

If you travel between different offices and to meetings a lot then fine, have your precious laptop. If you go in to work in one place all day everyday then get over yourself and ask work to give you a real computer.

You don't need to be able to take your work home with you and you shouldn't want to anyway. And any work that actually took you more than an hour of your life to complete shouldn't be stored on a laptop. Not unless you know about encryption and backups.

@ Bah Humbug

15 months a bit steep

Considering that the youff who stole about 3.5K worth of stuff from my house and burgled 5 other larger houses in the area only received 160 hours community service. He had not yet finished similar penalties for previous offences.